During a Thanksgiving Weekend in 2021 four friends – Peter & Lindsay, and Pete & Patricia – took Amtrak’s “Southwest Chief” from downtown Albuquerque NM to Las Vegas NM for an overnight at the historic Casteñeda Hotel. The Casteñeda was one of the original “Fred Harvey Hotels” established in the early 1900s to provide fine dining and other amenities to railroad travelers coming from out east to explore the wilds of the American Southwest. The hotel is situated right next to the Amtrak station in Las Vegas, New Mexico.

We had drinks at the elegant “Bar Casteñeda” and then made our way on foot across town to a funky local hotspot “The Skillet” for dinner. We would have some time the next day for a meandering walk to the Las Vegas plaza and surrounding neighborhoods before boarding the Southwest Chief and heading back to Albuquerque.

Over breakfast at the wonderful “Charlie’s Spic and Span” bakery and cafe in the morning, we got to talking about Lindsay’s List, some ideas of big and small projects Lindsay is interested in accomplishing in her life. (Lindsay comes up with the ideas, and Peter keeps track of them on a periodically updated list on his phone.) One of Lindsay’s crazy ideas was to develop a “camino-like” hike across northern New Mexico. The essential idea was that you could take a train from Albuquerque to Las Vegas and then HIKE westward from Las Vegas to Gallup, New Mexico at the western edge of the state, where you could pick up the train again and return to Albuquerque.

That would be a really really long hike, and possible routes were quite sketchy. But Patricia and Pete, both avid urban and nature hikers, thought this was an interesting project, and we voiced our encouragement for the idea.

On the train trip home, Peter ran through the entire Lindsay’s List, and we gave our upvotes and down votes mainly about how crazy or cool each idea seemed to us. There was a wide range of projects on the List, and some were (in all seriousness) worthy of encouragement. In the end, it was the hike across New Mexico that most captured our fancy. Pete and Patricia again voiced their enthusiasm, and Lindsay immediately said we should all work on it together. Pete said, “Well I hope we haven’t been too encouraging” because it would certainly be a daunting trek. None of us had ever actually done a multi-day hike, but the prospect was intriguing.

It turned out that Peter had already been looking at maps to see what route possibilities existed, and by the time we arrived back in Albuquerque we’d made plans for an initial day-trip exploration by car, beginning in Las Vegas, New Mexico.